Chronicles Magazine
July 2008

Over the years, John McCain has acquired a reputation as a maverick Republican. Independents and even some Democrats who loathe George W. Bush’s foreign-policy record seem to believe that McCain would be a significant improvement.

It is difficult to imagine, but there was a time when pundits in Washington were tagging John McCain as the ultimate unneoconservative Republican figure whose nationalist yet pragmatic approach to foreign policy was being viewed with suspicion by...

John McCain does not like the Russians. Nearly 17 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Soviet-style communism safely tossed into the dustbin of history, Senator McCain loves to scare us with the Russkie boogeyman.

Two weeks before his wife announced her intention to sue for divorce and ten days before she moved out leaving him the furniture, the toy poodle, her wedding dress, and several pairs of worn-out shoes at the back of the closet, Samuel Adams...

“While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it is...

Modern American conservatism has been marked by a fascination with ideology. Despite arguments that conservatism is not an ideology or is opposed to all ideology, American conservatives have regularly attempted to systematize their own beliefs.

X.J. Kennedy is admired for his great skill in treating contemporary topics in traditional forms and especially for his cultivation of light verse. Throughout the present book, Kennedy’s writing illustrates what almost every literate person...

In a recent column, Chuck Baldwin (lately nominated as the Constitution Party’s presidential candidate) pointed to something ominous that was largely ignored in the media reporting on the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal.

Christie’s, the auction house, took a full-page ad in the New York Times to publicize the record sale of a painting by a living artist, Lucian Freud, to the tune of $33.6 million. Thirty-three million greenbacks for a portrait of a...

I sometimes wish he would have joined me in going over to the Lutheran church, but Gramp is a hardcore Baptist and just never was interested in learning why we do all of that standing up and sitting down, why we say some of the same words every...

While Rockford voters lean Democratic, they might still be swayed in a presidential election by a Republican who took seriously the causes of the current recession: a costly and unnecessary war; the falling dollar; rising gas prices; overextended...

A half-century ago, in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), the Supreme Court referred to the “basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution” as “settled doctrine” and “a permanent and...

It is always reassuring when a big-budget superhero film fulfills its responsibility to edify the young. Iron Man, the latest Marvel comic book to come to life on the big screen, does just that. This movie teaches youngsters that it’s...

We once had a book about Eastern Europe at home, in between the encyclopedias and Robinson Crusoe. I do not remember its title nor the author’s name, but it contained highly atmospheric black and white photographs of Rumanian scenes.

When Texas Child Protective Services seized the children of mothers belonging to the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, I wondered if the Independent Republic was turning Yankee. The seizure was an abuse of power against the fundamental...

Republican partisans’ joy at an estimated 0.6-percent increase in U.S. Gross Domestic Product in the first quarter of 2008 has been diminished by the continued contraction of two key economic indicators used to determine whether a recession has...

Ruth Miller Besemer of Boulder, Colorado, and I exchanged letters for several months before we met. She sent the first in 1999, when The Rockford Institute held the annual meeting of the John Randolph Club in Georgetown.